My Background:
My engineering journey started at the end of 2002. I graduated as a Civil Engineer in July-August 2007. During my study, my focus was more on the technology than the traditional engineering path. I enjoyed automating many manual steps and tasks that the civil engineers follow to compute the structure's static. I worked a lot with Visual Basic on top of AutoCAD and Excel.
At that time, Structure dynamics and Earthquake engineering were new topics and a mystery for the Syrian engineering community. I was excited to learn more about those topics.
Following my passion for learning new stuff, I decided to continue studying and getting a Master degree. For that reason, I moved to Germany in October 2009 to attend a unique international engineering studying program at a small old German city called Weimar. "Natural Hazard and Risk in Structure Engineering" - "NHRE" is the program's name. The greatest advantage of that program is that the Earthquake Damage Analysis Center - EDAC that supervises the NHRE program deployed an earthquake monitoring system on several buildings in Turkey. The monitoring system was placed several hundred kilometers from my home city Tartous - Syria. I worked for more than a year as a working student for EDAC. There where I met "data" for the first time.
In March 2011, I was searching for my Master's thesis topic in earthquake engineering. We decided about the subject directly after the 11.03.2011 Japanese Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami occurred. I never wasted that chance. My Master's research was a kind of state of the art study because the event was a monster that we can't observe frequently. I had to collect and analyze data that was never analyzed before. Anxiety and excitement controlled my feeling for the next six months.
I collected and studied many reports and time-series data. I built statistical models that should help designing buildings against such massive disasters.
I wanted to dig deeper. Therefore, I decided to join the GRK1462 research group. During my doctoral life, I had to conduct a lot of experiments inside and outside the laboratory. My focus was to build models from vibration data to detect damage in the building and develop an assessment strategy to evaluate those models' quality.
I spent much time collecting and analyzing data. I enjoyed that process so that I had to take a break from time to time to remember the engineering problem I was trying to solve.
At the end of my doctoral study 2016-2017, it was the time to make the decision. I was equipment with the knowledge and the passion for working with data. I consulted a lot and tried different stuff before landing at the beginning of 2018 by the KI group. From then on, I work every day to build solutions using data and deploy the services that enable such solutions.
My principles (7Ps):
Solve the problem.
Deliver.
Short feedback loop in a healthy environment.
Never ever compromise quality.
Do the right thing and do the thing right.
Learning, learning, learning.
Push forward.
My Values:
Accountability
Transparency
Feedback
My Vision:
As you may summarize from my values and principles, I want to get the chance to be the founder of an open-mind sustainable business that delivers high-quality solutions to push people's lives forward toward better life quality. Therefore, I actively seek business knowledge. I want to have a solid understanding of the business metrics and concepts. I want to take more responsibility and positively impact the business using my tech skills and making decisions that ensure the right balance between business opportunity and the appropriate tech stack. I believe that "Startup is cool. To deliver is much cooler."